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Did viruses play a role in the extinction of Neanderthals? That’s what researchers from the Federal University of São Paulo have been trying to figure out, and in doing so, ended up uncovering the oldest known human viruses in a set of Neanderthal bones from over 50,000 years ago. Advertisement To make this finding, the […]

Last week, a “portal” was opened between New York, USA, and Dublin, Republic of Ireland. Before even a week was up, the portal had to be closed again temporarily due to “inappropriate behavior” on the Dublin side.  Advertisement The idea behind the portals, a creation by Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys, is pretty neat. Both cities […]

Two species of giant hummingbirds inhabit the Andes, rather than just one as previously assumed, a new study has revealed. The birds are distinguished by only tiny differences in their bodies – but their lifestyles could hardly be less alike, with one undertaking epic migrations while the other stays at high altitudes year-round. Advertisement Humanity’s […]

Graphene is a very weird material. It’s a single layer of carbon atoms organized in a honeycomb lattice. It has incredible strength and can conduct heat and electricity in a record-breaking way. The conductivity is based on the fact that electrons in the material behave like a viscous liquid. And like in any liquid, vortices […]

The world’s largest national park also happens to be one of the remotest and harshest places on planet Earth. Located within the Arctic Circle, the Northeast Greenland National Park is more than twice the size of the next biggest protected hotspot and consists mostly of frozen tundra. Advertisement Established in 1974, the park was expanded […]

What’s the longest you can hold your breath for? A minute, maybe even a few? That definitely feels like a long time when you’re doing it – but a few minutes has got absolutely nothing on the animal that can hold its breath the longest. Advertisement Under the sea If you were guessing in the […]

The plan to create the successor to the US Air Force’s Nightwatch aircraft – the so-called “Doomsday plane” that acts as an airborne strategic command and control post in the event of nuclear war – is gaining traction.  Advertisement In April, Sierra Nevada Corporation won a $13 billion contract with the Pentagon to build the […]

When was the last time you wrote something down by hand? For many of us, writing by hand may have become an infrequent – if not abandoned – practice. The ability to make notes on phones or to type out ideas with keyboards is generally quicker and easier, but is the value of writing by […]

Energy storage company BaroMar is preparing to test a new kind of grid-level energy storage that relies on water to function. If it works, it will be a cheaper way to stabilize renewable energy over longer periods of time.  Advertisement The world is gradually moving towards zero-carbon energy options, but the road ahead is not […]

How and when flowering plants evolved has been a longstanding question in botany – one that has a huge impact on the field and beyond, also affecting conservation, agriculture, and even medicine. Now, with the creation of the most detailed tree of life so far, we are poised to get some answers. After a mammoth sequencing […]

In the bubbling, super-acidic hot springs of Yellowstone National Park there lives a strange gang of viruses with an ancient origin. Because thermophiles – organisms that thrive at scorching hot temperatures – are deeply rooted in the evolutionary “tree of life,” it might even be possible to learn about the origins of life by studying […]

If you are even vaguely interested in the way the universe works, you have likely read about a mysterious substance proposed by physicists called “dark matter“. Advertisement Dark matter is invisible matter that doesn’t emit, reflect, or absorb light, and only interacts with normal matter through gravity. We have never detected it directly – but […]

You’re in the gym, and it’s nearly the end of your workout. You’re finishing on the stationary bike, so you hop on and get pedaling, dreaming of what you’re going to cook for dinner…but then you look at the clock. You’ve been cycling for longer than that, right? According to a new study, time really […]

Two approaches to improving the amount of charge that capacitors can store look to be bearing fruit, based on simultaneous publications by unconnected teams. Each offers the potential to make supercapacitors more potent energy storage devices, and perhaps put them into the race for large-scale energy storage. Advertisement Supercapacitors have long had an advantage over […]

Silicon is the cornerstone of computing. Its properties and abundance have made it so. You are reading this on a device that uses silicon chips. Quantum computers are the next giant leap in computing, capable of doing calculations that not even our most powerful supercomputers can do. And they might still based on silicon, but […]

An invasive river monster has become a big problem for native wildlife in parts of the US and Canda. The flathead catfish is set to become an apex predator as it eats its way through America, having been detected as far as Canada. Advertisement The flathead catfish (Pylodictis olivaris) really is a river monster, with […]

This weekend was a treat for lovers of the night sky all the way to mid-latitudes. The intense solar activity of the past week culminated in an extreme auroral event seen even to latitudes where you usually do not see such night sky spectacle. Social media was wonderfully inundated with pictures – probably helped by […]

If you’ve ever had good waffles (i.e. drenched in maple syrup), you have probably noticed a tiny little handle on the bottle. Advertisement Obviously, these handles are pretty impractical for pouring the syrup by anyone with hands bigger than a baby’s, and are largely ignored during the pouring process. So why are they there? One […]

This vivid rainbow of cells represents the largest-ever high-resolution 3D map of a section of the human brain. The largest, yes, but still just a cubic millimeter in size – about half a grain of rice. With this feat, scientists can now see the intricate web of 57,000 cells, connected by 150 million synapses and […]

Phosphorus is one of the few elements that may be essential for life, but its origins are something of a mystery. Core-collapse supernovae are known to form some phosphorus, but this source alone can’t explain its abundance and distribution within the galaxy. If novae, rather than supernovae, are the main source of phosphorus then what […]